College Student Has Earned 15 Million Miles by Hacking United

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The last time Georgia Tech student Ryan Pickren was in the news, he had been arrested and faced up to 15 years in jail. Two days before a rivalry football game, he hacked into rival University of Georgia’s website to post a prediction for the game (caution: mild language). But now, he’s using his hacking skills for good — and United has generously rewarded him for his work.

Hackers like Ryan are rewarded with up to 1 million United miles for each bug they find and report to United. Image provided by Ryan Pickren.

Ryan’s payout came from United’s Bug Bounty Program, which offers a reward of up to 1,000,000 United miles for reporting “high severity” bugs. While Ryan was unable to comment to The Points Guy about how many and what types of bugs he found, we can assume that the reward of 15 million miles means Ryan has likely found and reported 15 major issues in United’s systems. While it’s concerning that the airline’s systems were so porous, at least now United knows about these issues and can work to fix them.

Other white hat hackers have been wary of United’s bug bounty program. Other bug bounty programs give hackers the ability to try more creative methods of finding security faults — as long as the hacker reports all findings. However, United’s program threatens “possible criminal and/or legal investigation” for some of these methods. But, it seems these restrictions haven’t dissuaded Ryan from searching and finding flaw after flaw with United’s system.

The other major disadvantage of United’s Bug Bounty is that the only payout is United miles. While TPG values United miles at 1.5 cents each, United values its miles rather proudly at 2 cents apiece. Other hackers have ended up with huge tax bills for their efforts. Hacker Jordan Wiens ended up having to pay taxes on $25,000 of income for earning 1.25 million United miles — even though he still hadn’t redeemed any of the miles for travel.

At United’s valuation of 2 cents per mile, Ryan Pickren will have to pay taxes on $300,000 of income. That’s perhaps what has partially motivated his donation of 5 million United miles to Georgia Tech. Subject to IRS limitations, this donation will earn Ryan a deduction of $100,000. Ryan knows that Georgia Tech can use these miles to help student engineers make the world a better place — such as through the Georgia Tech Engineers Without Borders program to bring clean drinking water to Uganda.

15,000,000 United miles is enough to fly 100 people from the US to Africa to Tokyo and back to the US — all in business class!

Ryan initially started with the United Bug Bounty program to get enough miles to visit his girlfriend on the weekends. Well, now he can do a lot more than that! 15 million miles is enough for 600 domestic economy round-trips. But, having this many miles, he hopefully won’t fly economy class for a while.

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Editorial Note: Opinions expressed here are author's alone, not those of any bank, credit card issuer, airlines or hotel chain, and have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by any of these entities.